The popularity of computer and network technologies has been rapidly growing for the past two decades; however, it has been accompanied by a steady growth in cybercrime, which ranges from relatively harmless cases, such as distribution of unsolicited e-mail, commonly known as spam, to more serious cases of cybercrimes, such as denial of service attacks, stealing of confidential financial information, and even cyber warfare and terrorism. It has become obvious that it is imperative to aggressively combat cybercrime. And, one of the most commonly used means for protecting computers from cyber attacks is antivirus software.
Antivirus software is typically deployed on personal computers, network firewalls, mobile devices and is used to analyze Internet traffic, downloaded files and other digital content for presence of malware, such as viruses, worms and Trojans, spam and cyber attacks. However, since hundreds of new types and variation of malware emerge daily worldwide and spread globally within hours through the Internet, the antivirus software needs to have most current information about known malware in order to be able to combat spread of malware.
Currently, an antivirus industry uses centralized means for distribution of information about known malware. For example, most antivirus companies maintain central antivirus servers that contain information about known malware and periodically distribute this information to antivirus software deployed on computers throughout the world. However, this centralized malware information distribution mechanism often fails to keep up with the speed of emergence and spread of new types of malware and, as a result, more and more computers are getting infected by malware that was undetected my antivirus software deployed on these computers. Therefore, there is a need to improve the mechanism for distribution of malware related information between antivirus software deployed on personal computers.